The STACK Blog
Megawords, Meatpaper and fame
Monday, March 8th, 2010
As we prepare to send out the goodies for Stack America’s second mailing, including a really lovely magazine (which I’d love to tell you about, but don’t want to spoil the surprise), bonus content and an exclusive print by mag guru Robert Newman, we should take a moment firstly to laud Megawords, one of the two magazines we launched with, who are currently featured in an exhibition at Printed Matter in New York, and secondly, Meatpaper, our other launch title, was described by Boing Boing guest editor Jimmy Guterman thusly: “I never wanted to read a magazine about meat, but my life is enriched because I did.”
Guterman, a Stack America subscriber, then went on to praise your humble independent magazine service, calling it “a superb curational service that selects independent magazines and sends ‘em out every other month.
“At a time when some aging mainstream print magazines are trying to convince readers that dead trees are still a commercial endeavor (wishful thinking), it’s reassuring to come across an outfit that realizes that print magazines aren’t just useful. They’re cool. They’re art. As noted on the Stack America blog, they’re “independent, creative media at its finest.”
Gorblessyou, sir.
Recommended reading
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Last week we posted the first set of recommended magazines based on Jeremy’s magCulture list, but they keep on coming so it’s time for list number two. Follow the links below, and if you’ve got a treasured magazine you think more people should know about, let us know.
Exit
Magazine?
Purple
Why?
SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE. Oh and Olivier Zahm, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin make it very special.
It’s Nice That
Alex Bec, editor
Magazine?
Apartamento
Why?
It’s beautifully put together, and as we all know there’s nothing more interesting than having a nose around other people’s houses…
Kasino A4
Pekka Toivonen, creative director
Magazine?
Jacques
Why?
I found this title through a good friend and a trustable collegue of mine, Swedish photographer Knotan. What I love about Jacques is the magazine’s simplicity: it is clearly about one thing and that one thing only – the beauty of a female figure. With this amazing simplicity it avoids the usual stepping stones of any “different” kind of adult mags: complexity and fashionwiseness. It doesn’t intellectualize sex. It doesn’t make looking at naked women any kind of state of art. Yet, it’s nothing like you’re used to in this particular genre.
The imagery is partly raw and partly beautiful. The women of Jacques simply look amazing, there’s no “we’re getting paid” in their faces. The overall aesthetics has a nice retro touch, reminding me of the best men’s magazine yet – Playboy in its ambitious years in the 60s and the 70s. With a clear reference to that time, the chosen style doesn’t seem like a copy or a matter of trend – I find it a statement saying: this is what we think looks good and sexy. Agreed!
Newspaper Club
Russell Davies
Magazine?
The New Yorker
Why?
The New Yorker’s like the BBC; if it didn’t exist we’d have no way to invent it. It sits there, a few copies in most newsagents, even in motorway service stations an unregarded miracle; cloaked like a dowdy middle-aged version of Time Out New York but packed with the most exciting, timely, thoughtful writing in the world. Long, dense and delicate articles about the arcane and the universal, the best music, movie and book reviews, the occasional funny cartoon and a complete absence of celebrity deification. What else could you want in a magazine?
M is for More Magazines
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Andrew’s Designers Series got off to a flying start last month when he sent out Jeremy Leslie’s very fine magazine recommendations to all Stack America subscribers. It went out to the rest of Stack at the start of this month, and the next in the Designers Series will be coming out soon.
But we’re not done with the recommendations yet. One of the main reasons for starting Stack was to help people discover new independent magazines, so we’ve used Jeremy’s picks as a starting point to find even more. We’re asking people from all the titles he named to give us their own recommendations for magazines that everyone should read.
The first few are included below, so watch out for more in the coming weeks. And we want to hear your recommendations too – drop us a line in the comments box if you’ve got a magazine we should all know about.
Manzine
Kevin Braddock, editor
Magazine?
I always look for Smoke – A London Peculiar. Classic fanzine format (though with colour pages) and full of oblique essays, memoirs and narratives about London.
Why?
Matt and Jude have a long history in indie fanzine publishing and I love the way they turned London itself into a subject of fandom. Apart from that, it’s just very funny – their Urban Interventions series was laugh-out-loud. Apart from Viz and Private Eye, very few magazines make an active attempt to make their readers laugh. Magazines on the whole are far too serious and cool for my liking.
Publication
Nick Turpin, publisher
Magazine?
8 Magazine produced in London by Jon Levy
Why?
8 Magazine serves a whole community of people who value photojournalism and great story telling, in a time when the traditional magazine outlets for that work have vanished. Jon Levy’s passion for photojournalism has produced a contemporary Picture Post, which really has no rival. The magazine is produced by Foto8 in London who also use their ‘Host Gallery’ space to show photographic exhibitions, talks and discussions. Foto8 is also very active online and in using social media, especially Twitter, to keep the community aware of world events such as the struggle of the opposition movement in Iran and the issues around the photographic coverage of the recent earthquake in Haiti. 8 Magazine might be considered a model for the publishing industry in the way that it is self published, distributed online and through subscription and uses social media to build and maintain a like-minded community of readers. This way it has succeeded in championing photojournalism where the weekend supplements and traditional news magazines have increasingly failed.
Sang Bleu
Maxime Buechi, editor
Magazine?
More than one magazine, there seems to be a kind of new “movement” going on in the magazine world. It is not structured as a coherent flux but more like certain traits certain titles seem to have in common. This “movement” would include magazines like Some/Things, Lurve and Encens. And to a certain extent Acne Paper and Grey. You find it in many blogs too. They are a real step forward from the mainstream approach of Fashion and Arts you find in usual Magazines. I totally identify with that.
Why?
Because there seems to finally be something tangibly new happening in the art and fashion world. Young people don’t all relate to the glam and gloss, celebrity and money in these fields. They have become global and democratic whether you like it or not.
Yummy
Pascal Monfort, editor-in-chief
Magazine?
Pop from the UK. It’s not new but the new art director, my friend Michael, is doing the best job. And Kilimanjaro.
Why?
They’re my “inutiles”, so they are “necessaries”.
Calling all type nerds
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Lars Harmsen, editor of Slanted magazine, and Raban Ruddigkeit are once again inviting contributions to Typodarium, the calendar that provides a daily dose of typographic goodness.
They explain: “It’s a tear-off calendar like the one our grandmas used to hang in the kitchen. Each font will be prominently displayed on the front calender sheet. On the back there will be a detailed description of how the font originated, from whom and from what the inspiration came as well as where it can be obtained.
“You have the opportunity to book a maximum of seven favourite days in advance. The sooner you do so, the more choice you’ll have. Typodarium 2011 is distributed in design and museum shops and selected bookstores around the world.”
So there you go. Get your entry in by 1 April and join the date-based typographic geek out.
Kickstart a magazine
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
At the start of the month we wrote a post that ended by asking whether anyone out there had come up with a clever way of starting a new magazine. And the answer, all the way from Brooklyn, is yes.
Remedy Quarterly is a lovely food magazine – small format, perfect bound and mixing storytelling with recipe writing, it draws upon the personal recollections of food lovers to create a worthy addition to America’s current crop of independent food magazines.
But if Remedy is in good company thematically, it’s entirely unique when it comes to the way that it’s funded.
I spoke to Aaron Carambula, one of its editors and designers, and he explained how he and his co-editors had talked about starting their own food magazine and had always assumed they’d have to fund it themselves and try to recoup the cost later. But then they came across a new site called Kickstarter, and realised that they could use it to drum up support and get people to pay for copies before the magazine even existed.
Aaron explains: “I don’t know how many NPR pledge drives you’ve had to endure because you live in the UK, but Kickstarter works the same way. You say, ‘well, for this amount you get this, for a higher amount you get something else’. We set it up so that for $7, which is 50c off cover, people got an issue, and they got it before it was available anywhere else.
“But then we had to fill this space between the $7 single issue pledge and a $34 subscription, and we thought maybe people would like to give them away as a gift, so for $14 you get two copies, and a lot of people have opted for that. And we went from there. We designed a tote bag to give away, then we went up into the more generous sponsorship areas, where you get your name in the back of the book and you can be a bit more of an altruistic sponsor rather than just buying your copies, and we got a few of those.”
Just 15 days into the pledge drive Remedy was mentioned on US blog Design Sponge, and within 24 hours they had exceeded the amount they needed for start up, allowing them to amp up the paper and print quality and generally make Remedy even better than they’d hoped.
Now Remedy is out in shops and it’s being sold via the website, so it needs to find readers in the same way as any other magazine, but Kickstarter not only funded the set up and print of the first issue, it’s also provided a boost that gives it the sort of momentum a new magazine always needs.
Kickstarter is a relatively new idea but it’s growing fast and seems ideally suited for starting magazines. It has a whole section dedicated to journalism and a clear bias towards the independent, so if you’re reading this and thinking about creating your own independent title, get yourself over there and take a look. And let us know – we want to hear about all the new Kickstarter magazines as they happen.
Cook book
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
I first came across the brilliant new food magazine Fire & Knives through Jeremy’s post on magCulture. He seemed so excited by it I had to track down a copy for myself, and I wasn’t disappointed with what I found.
The USA has a particularly rich seam of independent food magazines. We’ve written here before about Diner Journal, The Art of Eating and Swallow, and we were proud to make Meatpaper the first delivery from Stack America this year. And then there’s Remedy (more to come on that one very soon).
So it’s about time that Britain got its own food magazine and F&K does us proud. In his first editor’s letter, Tim Hayward writes about the importance of approaching food as an amateur (‘one who loves’) rather than a connoisseur (‘one who knows’), a distinction that elegantly sums up the difference between F&K and what you might usually expect to find in a food magazine.
I don’t think I saw any recipes in it, and instead I enjoyed a shaggy dog (or scraggy bird?) story about a quail that takes over a man’s life, an account of horror actor Vincent Price’s little known foray into the realm of the TV chef, and the dining experiments that centred around Belsize Park’s Isokon Building in the 1930s.
Oh, and it’s all beautifully designed by the creative talent behind Anorak. Look out for it coming soon on Stack.
‘SUPer star
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
This month’s Stack delivery is ‘SUP, the inventive, ultra-cool trans-Atlantic music magazine. Started 12 years ago by editor Marisa Brickman and going stronger than ever, it’s full of clever design ideas and refreshingly unpretentious writing. Marisa landed in London yesterday after a two-week stint in New York, so we caught up with her fresh off the flight to hear how the magazine has grown from its humble beginnings, and how exactly you make a magazine based in two continents in your spare time.
Yet another reason to subscribe
Friday, February 12th, 2010
When I started Stack America, I wanted to add a few bonus extras into the mix. And so, I’m delighted to officially make public ‘The Designers Series’. Quite simply, it’s this: for each bimonthly Stack America mailing, we invite a magazine creative to make an exclusive print on the theme of ‘magazines’. And then we send it out along with our mailings containing a selection of remarkable independent mags.
Of course, Stack America subscribers already knew that, as last month they received an exclusive image made by Jeremy Leslie (yeah, that one). There’s a tiny square of it above. If you want to see the rest… well, you should have subscribed. Stack Original subscribers: you should also be getting it soon.
Meanwhile, my fellow Stack Americans, it is my honour to announce that next month’s mailing will include a really lovely, exclusive print by Robert Newman, former design director of New York, Fortune and Details. If you were thinking about subscribing before, surely that has tipped the scales. Also makes a lovely Valentine’s gift, you know.
